Not period appropriate headwear

After kissing my wife (even though she says she is saving her first kiss for our cat), I whip off my glasses at midnight and say I will not need them any longer. "I have twenty-twenty vision."

For this already tired joke, I should have been summarily executed.

Kristina is absent from the party by then and so does not have to contemplate the portent of first kisses. (I am never clear on her current relationship, if indeed they have been on-again anytime in the last five years. It is not a frequent topic of conversation between us.)

Before she left, I told her when, long before Amber but after a breakup, I was at a party with my friends Dan and Stephanie. I had been dancing with a woman, Jen, and asked her if we might kiss at midnight. She asked my age and then politely declined on the grounds of my being far too old to kiss. At midnight, she kissed a boy who had been doing shots out of her bellybutton, as these things go. It's likely best I didn't have that kiss as precedent.

I have missed a few kisses since that night, where my lover was states away, but since the late 1990s I have almost always known to whom my first kiss would go. (There was one New Year's Eve after Kate left me. I had gone on a few dates and kissed some people, but I do not think I did that night.) The first kiss of the new year is a funny superstition, but I like it better than mistletoe. Give me a chance to expect it, to plan for it. A kiss is rarely best as an ambush.

Kristina said an hour before midnight that she had to get home to watch the ball drop with her family. She had made these plans with us already because had us promise that she could watch BTS play beforehand, but she places emphasis on being with her family that I do not extend to my own, much as I love them. If my family told me that they wanted to watch the ball drop with me once I was already situated at a party, I would assure them it would be on Youtube. We could watch it later, ideally at some 5pm so we could get home for an early bedtime.

All our electronics informed us the year had changed half a minute before the ball had finished its descent, thousand of people in Time Square spending their first moments of the new year counting to zero instead of kissing. They were a half step behind the rest of us, thirty seconds lesser in 2020, lingering in unenviable 2019. It is leap year, though, and they may not realize their loss.

The party was at Amber's mother's home, where her sister Rebecca, visiting from Texas, gathered with her friends in a Roaring Twenties theme shindig. (Not a Great Gatsby fete, as that is not the story we care to invoke.) Aside from Rebecca and me--and arguably Amber--no one much pays attention to this theme. Who can fault them? Most are well-dressed. That suffices. We have so few occasions in our lives where fancy dress is encouraged. It is our Roaring Twenties now and we will decide what that means rather than succumbing to an echo.

I do not tend to see flipping the calendar as particularly meaningful. It's a new day, but that is about it. It is the same me, making gradual progress. I cannot even claim its effect will be a few ruined checks because I do not recall the last time I had need to write one. I do not make any resolutions. What would be the point?

I do have goals for this month that I planned out owing to how chips fell rather than it being 2020.

Early this year I am going to try to find an agent for To Save Her World, the next entry in/a soft relaunching of my Night's Dream Series. I am going to publish Holidays with Bigfoot, a book of travel-adjacent essays as soon as Amber approves it and makes the cover. I seem to be building a friendship with Melissa, though who knows where that will go, having seen her once for a few hours and thereafter messaging?

I see nothing specific on my horizon and I am not sorry for that. Everything else is maintenance and keeping with my goals. I will continue publishing a story every two weeks on my professional site. I will keep my physical and mental health a daily focus. I will continue to work at my relationship with Amber. I may try to make new friends, but I cannot say I will do this actively.

Amber and I stay up late for us, getting home around one-thirty and to sleep by two. Amber gets herself up at 7:23am, sunrise, because she wants to be able to sleep tonight before work the day after. Her life is regimented, not that mine isn't most of the time. I used to go to bed at four in the morning and I do not now understand how I could do this or why. The world is quieter then and I told myself I used these hours to write, but I did not do as well then as I can now at 3pm.

I have no strong plans for the coming year. I am going on vacation in Lake George in August. Beyond that, I do not have any trips planned, though Amber wanted me to annotate a calendar of my school breaks to see if she can find time for one. I don't have specific things to which I am looking forward and I do not mind. My sense of time remains shot. I thought today "Oh, it is a few months until spring," though I conveniently ignored that it is only a few weeks since it turned officially winter. Priorities.

The wheel keeps turning. I hope I do something good with this day and the one after. Hoping for a whole year may be biting off too much.

Soon in Xenology: Magical thinking and witchcraft.

last watched: Dracula
reading: Mogworld